The concept of the “male gaze” comes from Laura Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures, specifically, in an essay written in 1973 entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In this article, Mulvey explains that the presumptive viewer of television and film is presumed to be male, and the act of creating a visual image for this presumed-male viewer takes into account the fact that the things on screen are being perceived by that viewer’s gaze—his “male gaze.” What this means for women on tv and in movies is that they are often treated, first and foremost, as objects of sexual desire, or, at least, relative to their potential as objects of sexual desire. For Mulvey, the male gaze thus transforms women into objects which codify and reify the male sexual fantasy of prowess—itself the product of a subconscious fear of emasculation/castration (Mulvey was very much into Freud and Lacan, like a lot of academics in the 1970s and 1980s). Thus, the images of women portrayed in film and tv were designed, she explains, to play into male fantasies so that men viewing them would feel empowered by them.

So that’s what the “male gaze” actually is. To a certain extent, Mulvey is probably right—the presumptive audience of most popular media is straight, white, and male. The “default.” If the default audience—especially true in gaming—is presumed to be straight, white, and male, then that is going to shape the way media is created in order to cater to that audience. This isn’t complex theory—it’s the product of basic market forces. However, the male gaze becomes problematic when those market forces become an excuse for oppressive or diminishing behaviors; when the sexual-objectification part of the male gaze takes precedence to such a degree that it functionally eliminates any sort of agency for anyone who is not straight, white, or male.

Importantly, Mulvey’s understanding of the male gaze also takes into consideration is the fact that those market forces are themselves the product of patriarchal oppression, and that it is possible to reshape those forces by changing the way media are made. One can take into consideration multiple possible audiences, or the fact that one’s audience might be comprised of a varying demographic. We have—especially in videogames—taken the “biggest” slice of the demographic pie as the “type” of pie for so long that we’ve forgotten that even though there may be more straight, white, male gamers than any single other combination of those categories, there are actually more gamers who do not fit at least one of those components than there are those who fit all three. Accepting that fact suggests, then, that the same market forces which are supposedly driving the production of games for straight, white males really ought to be thinking more broadly about their content—to be appealing to the rest of the pie.

And that’s where Sarkeesian’s series comes in. In this episode, she’s using the idea of the male gaze to highlight that the way in which many characters are animated presumes that same male gaze, not simply in the market forces sense, but also in the sexual-fantasy sense. She makes the very sensible point that women in games don’t have to move or behave in sexualized ways, and that the only reason they do so is because of the sexual-fantasy side of the male gaze.

In this episode, Sarkeesian begins with Destiny, a game in which players customize their characters’ appearance at the beginning. Destiny allows players—as she notes—to choose male or female, and to determine skin color and other racialized features so that their character absolutely does not have to be the stereotypical white male protagonist. Sarkeesian even commends the “stylish” but “sensible” armor worn by both genders. What she takes issue with is the fact that the female models have a different style of animation than the male ones. When the male model sits down, he sits on his butt and rests his elbows on raised knees. The female model side-sits, ostensibly “like a delicate flower.”

Yes, I do find it weird that the two models can’t sit the same way, but “delicate flower” is not what I would term the side-sit. Maybe “awkward,” but if she were to sit splay-kneed like the male character, then we’d be given a full view of her crotch… clothed. I’d actually be fine with that. I sit that way (also clothed). Of course, I also side-sit sometimes, too, usually when I’m wearing a skirt and have to sit on the floor so that I don’t flash my crotch at people.

I think that this instance is less a case of “make the girl into a delicate flower” and more a weird kind of White Knight accidental sexism as the result of a thought process that made someone think “We can’t have a woman spreading her legs, that would be rude!” So while I think it’s strange and probably accidentally sexist to have two different sitting animations, I’m not convinced that the motivation Sarkeesian ascribes to it is the right one.

Next, Sarkeesian moves on to more comparisons—Nathan Drake to Bayonetta (cross-game, which isn’t totally fair), or Batman and Catwoman in Arkham City (which is more than fair, and that drove me crazy when I played it, and not just because of her animations… her outfit was idiotic, too). She then begins to talk about the female characters who walk “with an exaggerated hip sway.”

Okay. Yes. They do that. But this is where basic biology and the idea of exaggerated movement in animation for the sake of “reading” come in. When you animate something—like when you do something on a stage—you have to exaggerate it a bit in order to make it “read” correctly to the viewer. Some of the examples Sarkeesian points to—like Catwoman—are exaggerated to a ridiculous level and deserve ridicule. Some of them—Jill Valentine—are just sloppily animated, from the clip she included. Some of them—Assassin’s Creed Syndicate—are actually just fine because if you have ever walked behind two people and one is male and one is female, you will have noticed that the female’s hips sway more. Because they’re built differently. That’s a thing.

This is one of the only instances in which I will call on gender essentialism, ever. Make a note. Women’s hips are built differently and we therefore walk differently than men. As a woman who doesn’t do the hip sway thing very much at all, I can promise you that I still do it more than the vast majority of men simply because it’s not something one can help if one has female hips. If a game’s animators want to recognize that basic difference, then, yes, a female character is going to have some hip-sway. I saw the same clip Sarkeesian did, and I wasn’t buying it, at least not in Assassin’s Creed. (Sarkeesian does note this, but she assumes that the hip sway comes from wearing heels—which, although heels exaggerate it, isn’t totally accurate.)

And then she moves on to Saint’s Row, which allows you to switch genders whenever you want, and the female animation is a more exaggerated sway than necessary, but it’s Saint’s Row. There is nothing serious about Saint’s Row. It’s the videogame version of Mel Brooks’s History of the World. Or Spaceballs. You can’t really criticize it for being exaggerated, because that’s rather the whole point.

The sequence of highly sexualized walks—most of which actually were ridiculous, particularly for a sniper in heels, which is so many things wrong with it—does show an overall problem with female character creation, as applicable to animation as to costume and model design (to say nothing of personality or lack thereof). Many female characters in games are over-sexualized and, yes, created as objects for the Mulvian male gaze, and that is a problem. And so is—as Sarkeesian notes—the fact that so many of these ostensible warriors are engaging in combat in heels. Heels are an idiot idea for combat and are, as Sarkeesian notes, included in character creation in media (film, tv, videogames, even Barbie) as part of the male gaze fantasy.

While this episode was definitely better than the last (see here for my review on that one), it still suffers from the problem of alienation, although I’m not sure it’s a concern Sarkeesian will ever be able to escape. The tone and list-style of these episodes is off-putting to the very people who most need to understand the content they contain. Sadly, I don’t really have an answer to that. I do think that they could still do more—these shorter episodes may be more likely to garner viewers because of the reduced time-commitment, but they remain just as, if not even more-so, shallow as the longer laundry-list episodes of season one. I want more meat to these criticisms, more teeth. I want to see Sarkeesian place these characters in a context where they have meaning, instead of being a parade of swaying buttocks that can only be scanned as “swaying butts are bad.” That said, the point she’s trying to make is a valid one.

We need to pay as much attention to animation as we do to any other part of character creation in games. Sarkeesian’s example of Ellie from Last of Us is a positive one, since Ellie (thankfully, since she’s a child) isn’t sexualized in terms of costume, personality, role, or movement. Her point is that animation, like any other choice being made in the process of character creation, should serve the purpose of the character and not the sexual fantasies of the audience. If the character is a model, then she should walk like one. If she’s a space marine, then she should move like a space marine. The problem arises when the space marine walks like a model because it makes her butt look hot—objectifying her derriere for the sake of the male gaze to the detriment not just of her character, but of the story as a whole, and, more broadly, for women in the real world.

In other words, this tendency to over-sexualize our female characters—no matter the medium—creates the assumption (conscious or unconscious) that sexual attractiveness is more important than competence, a message which devalues women’s abilities in favor of their willingness to cater to male sexual fantasies.

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Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us epitomizes the central ideological premise of much of games journalism today–in both the good and the bad ways. Goldberg gets his facts right, but the book is ultimately an homage to a strange kind of cult-of-the-genius that permeates games, a tendency of both journalists and fans to hero-worship the “giants of the industry” in blatant disregard of the fact that games (like movies) are made by teams of dozens to hundreds of people.

At its core, All Your Base is a history of the personalities behind videogames, despite the subtitle’s claim that it will tell us “How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture.” With a subtitle like that, I fully expected to read about how pop culture itself was transformed by the arrival of interactive entertainment and user-generated narratives. I thought the book would talk about the rise of videogames as a cultural phenomenon which transformed the way we think and interact with both technology and one another.

It isn’t. At all.

All Your Base is a who’s-who of videogames pioneers, and, as such, is an interesting artifact which charts the important people whose ideas transformed the industry, if not the genre, from the 1950s all the way up to the early 2000s. Goldberg pinpoints games which revolutionized the genre, yes, but he does so less in terms of ideological transformations and more in terms of individual decisions.

For example, Goldberg looks at Roberta Williams, the narrative intellect behind the King’s Quest series, and her husband Ken, who did most of the initial programming for the early Sierra games. Although Goldberg does a little gendered pandering to our sympathies by framing the chapter in terms of Roberta crying under the covers (which did annoy me quite a bit), he also makes the very salient point that she is one of the most influential people–not just women–in gaming’s history, and that we all-too-often fail to recognize that precisely because she is a woman. I also did not, for what it’s worth, appreciate his remark that “sadly, no woman since Roberta has had such a long-running impact on games and on game companies. Decades later, Sierra still represents the high point for women in videogames” (158).

I think we could have done without that.

I suppose I’m also having trouble with the overall hero-worship attitude of the book, which frames most of the developers featured therein as men (and Roberta) working at the edge of a wild digital frontier, great heroes in the scope of Daniel Boone or Natty Bumppo who had inspirational ideas which appear to have been visited upon them from some sort of cyber-deity and could never be had by mere mortals like us. This is an attitude I have witnessed both first-hand and online from fans, particularly those who all-but-grovel before the shadows of Great Men like Peter Molyneux or Ken Levine. Goldberg is particularly laudatory of Levine, whom he characterizes as an artist fighting to defend the ideas of his beleaguered creative staff.

I can’t help but call shenanigans on the whole concept of the cult of the genius that has, in general, not just in All Your Base, become central to games journalism and fandom. The men and women–yes, women, plural–who work in the games industry are ALL doing a lot of very hard, very good work. Games like BioShock are the product of thousands of hours put in by hundreds of people–it did not spring, fully-formed, out of Levine’s head. Certainly, it would not have been what it was without Levine’s steering, and, as such, he absolutely deserves credit, but to focus on individuals (Levine or any of the other examples in All Your Base) is to ignore the inherently collaborative nature of the genre.

For what it is–a collective biography of a collection of innovators in the industry–All Your Base is a smooth-reading narrative of the people who catalyzed most of the major genre-shifts in gaming. What it is not is a history of how games changed pop culture. It is non-critical, non-theoretical, but still interesting, if you can (unlike me) get over its hero-worship.

Summary: All Your Base is not a critical history of games so much as it is a biographical history of the most influential people in gaming from the 1950s to about 2010. If you are interested in success stories and videogames, it’s an interesting read, but it doesn’t really provide a good history of the games themselves.

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The warning in this post is that it’s a little long, and it gets pretty seriously heavy at the end. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I make the jump to the last world, where I have to fight through more Ura (who are also after the shard). Rucks says that “The Calamity failed. The Ura are proof of that.” So the fact that people are still alive means that Caelondia failed to be complete dicks, and I’m on the side of the dicks. Great. I still have to finish this game, so I’m just going to continue to be an oppressor, because that’s how institutionalized systemic racism works, kids!

As I continue, Rucks explains: “At the heart of the Calamity was a simple idea. We never wanted to go to war again. Wanted to rule it out.” So the ethos of the preemptive strike. Not only are we the aholes here, we are the worst possible type of aholes. I’m guessing the Caelondians are allegorical stand-ins for Americans. Because let’s face it, Americans are usually the a**holes (and deservedly so).

Now the Kid is moving quickly through different worlds, I’m guessing that I’m actually invading Uran territory in an effort to take the last shard, which I’m also guessing is going to allow me the option of repeating the Calamity… or not. I’m hoping that’s not where this goes. Really hoping.

As I go, Rucks continues narrating the story of the Calamity. He says that the breakthrough came from an Ura, “A brilliant scientist named Venn.” And now it’s starting to sound a little Manhattan Project—a foreign scientist joins a group trying to use atrocity to end all wars… and creates the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Because that worked out so well.

He continues, talking about how Venn realized what he was doing and tried to sabotage the process, except he was caught: “Imagine how Venn felt when they made him pull that trigger.” Oh, we are definitely the a**holes, here.

Rucks then gets a little (more) creepy on me and says, “But remember. The Bastion can fix everything.” I’m betting by “fix,” Rucks, you mean “destroy,” because you’re an a**hole. But I am stuck on this trajectory because you are the one telling the story, and I’m just a character in it. At least for now. As Rucks says, “The Kid has little choice but to pick up where the Calamity left off.”

Except not. Because apparently I have to go rescue Zia first. I do not want to go rescue Zia. I do not want to rescue Zia because I do not want to pander to the stupid damsel-in-distress trope that is apparently a core part of 99.99% of all videogames (okay, not really, I made that statistic up, but it’s gotta be more than 80%). I do not want to rescue Zia because, as Rucks said, she went home. HOME. To her people. Who do not look down on her or want to commit genocide, which is more than I can say for Rucks here. Or myself, probably, since I was one of the guards on the walls, which means I was up to my eyeballs in institutionally sanctioned violence before the Calamity went down. I want to just leave her alone. But that is not a choice I am given, because Rucks is the jerk telling the story.

So I take the skyway to Zulten’s Hollow to kill a bunch more people who are fully justified in wanting me and Rucks dead. Because I’m the a**hole.

Once the Ura are dead, the Kid acquires a Calamity Cannon, the “care package” from Rucks. Apparently the Ura have erected obelisks that stop the Calamity from spreading, so of course I have to destroy them, because, again, a**hole.

So come with me on my angel-of-death genocide trip through the country!

This is making me both bored and vaguely disgusted. Of course the Ura are trying to defend their keep and their homeland. Of course they’re confused about why some a**hole Kid is running rampant through their castle, killing them all for no good reason. I really am not the good guy here, and I know it, and that is absolutely sucking all the fun out of this process. I have played many games where the gameplay is, in essence, going on a killing spree. I have enjoyed those games, but, I’m discovering, largely because the fiction of the game is that I’m in the right. I may be homicidal, but I am homicidal with ethics. Here, I’m not just homicidal, but genocidal, and only because Rucks seems to think it’s a good idea, and I’m (or the Kid, anyway) utterly incapable of denying him.

It bears very disturbing similarities to what’s happening in this election campaign with Donald Trump and his followers, one of whom punched a protestor and is quoted as saying that “Maybe next time we’ll kill him.” It’s not even “I,” it’s “We.” “We” is a terrifying, collectivist proclamation which tells me that not only has Trump’s rhetoric of hate become out-of-control, it’s creating a borderline fascist sentiment in his followers and allowing them to justify not only group-think, but collective bigotry, racism, and Islamophobia in the name of “Making America great again.”

In Bastion, Rucks is my Donald Trump, and I, as the Kid, am powerless in the face of his authoritarian rhetoric. And it’s sickening.

Rucks continues, and I want him to shut up if only so I can fell less horrible about playing. He says, with the same tone he’s been using all along, but which now feels tinged by a maniacal glee, that the Ura are being “beaten by a Kid. They underestimated us all along.” There’s so much White American Exceptionalism here it’s disgusting.

“Did the Ura really think we’d just turn around and walk away?” I wish we had. I really, really wish we had. Because that’s what we should have done. Turned around and walked away. But if I, as the player, had done that, you, dear reader, would not be reading this now and would not be finding out that the creators of Bastion were eerily prescient about the trajectory of hate on which our nation’s politics would embark.

And now we’re heading down the assimilationist path: “Suppose old Zulf shoulda got to know us better.” Suppose he got to know us well enough to know we’re a**holes? Oh, wait, he totally did. And that’s why he attacked the Bastion. Which I am totally down with.

But the Kid keeps going, and “way out there…that’s where he finds you. But it ain’t like Prosper Bluff this time.” So he’s talking to Zia. That just made this whole thing so much creepier.

Zia—probably because she has no choice—agrees, the screen tells me, to return to the Bastion. Rucks says, “Zia, you just had to see if everything Zulf wrote to you was true.” Of course she did, you a**hole! I am so done with Rucks. So very, very done. I really hope this game ends with his downfall, and the Kid’s, too. Because they are horrible people. I hope Zia and the critters get to go off and live a happy life by her pond where she sings to them, because living on a militarized island in the sky with two crazy psychotics is not really a happy ending.

When the Kid shows Zia a child’s drawing, Rucks says, “They lost everythin’, but they just keep on fightin’, like that’s gonna bring it all back.” My god, Rucks, you are a monster. Oh, and when the Kid shows her the harp, he asks if she isn’t sure she didn’t drop it on purpose? Victim-blaming much, Rucks? Ugh.

If the Kid shows the drawing to Rucks, he says he doesn’t need to see it—“I’m tryin’ to undo it, remember?” I remember. I remember that you’re a creepy old man who was party to the original destruction and is still killing people out of some weird but hopefully at least misguided desire to “make things right,” although I’m pretty sure my idea of right and yours are very different.

I head back to the skyway, and it tells me that this is the last shard, and once I have it, that’s it. There’s no going back. Good. I can’t stand much more of Rucks.

The Tazal Terminals. “The Calamity hit the Tazal Terminals hardest of all,” Rucks says. “You know why Zulf went back there. That was his home.” Rucks also says that he can’t “hear” the Kid from there. That it must be empty at the Terminals, with Zulf all alone—as the Kid battles his way through more Ura than I’ve had to face thus far, which tells me that not only is Rucks an a**hole, he’s an ignorant one who never bothered to find out anything about the people he decided to exterminate.

So the whole story—start to finish—is Rucks talking to Zia while they wait for the Kid to come back from slaughtering her people. This is the worst. He’s a psychologically abusive, manipulative, and clearly sexist a**hole who is holding her functionally against her will while his goon is out there killing what remains of her people because… I’m not really sure why. Mostly because Caelondia is an elitist bunch of jerks who think that they are better than everyone else (no, we don’t know anybody like that, now, do we?). And so he’s telling her the story of her own victimization as though he is the victim. Ugh. Double ugh. Triple ugh. I-need-a-shower ugh.

Rucks then says, that when the Kid returns, “all of us will be gone. No, we’re not gonna die. It’s more like all of us will just—stop.” Great. I’m down with that. You can stop anytime, Rucks. “Things will all go back to the way they used to be. That’s the power of the Bastion.” Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. We are not repeating this again. Can I destroy it, instead? I’m with Zulf here. Totally on Team Zulf.

Rucks then goes on to explain that he designed the Bastion—no kidding—and that there isn’t anything, really, to stop the Calamity happening all over again. The implication is that somehow the Kid remembers what happened, and that because the Kid remembers (he wasn’t on the Bastion when it reset), the Kid might be able to prevent it. Or maybe the Kid is going to suffer from severe PTSD. Or maybe he turns into the next psychotic Rucks.

Rucks then says there’s another possible use of the Bastion—we could detonate the cores and take off, “never goin’ back. Ever. Again.” I’m down with that. Because we’re horrible people who deserve to be banished for all eternity. Does that mean we have to take Zia? Because that’s awful for her.

Well, now. This is interesting. I fight through a bunch more Ura, then pick up a battering ram from the ram-deity, which is like the world’s most annoying super-weapon. I have to fight some elite warriors and a pile of normal ones away from the shard, and start to head “back.” Then I see a group of Ura attacking something, kill them when they turn on me, and find an unconscious Zulf lying on the ground. The game then asks me what I want to do: leave him, or take him with me. The text in the game suggests that if I leave him, he will die. If I take him, I have to give up the battering ram (which I hate anyway, but it’s the only weapon I have).

I’m going to take him.

So this is very interesting. As I walk—slowly, because Zulf is apparently very heavy, we get shot continuously by the Ura, but I have no weapons, so we just have to take the hits. There’s a melancholy dirge in the background about going “home, sweet, home.” I no longer have a HUD (Head’s Up Display) with a healthbar. I just have to keep walking, until either I die or the game takes over and sends us to a cutscene.

Actually, they stop shooting. Except one, until her fellow Ura shoot her. They watch me walk toward the skyway, and Rucks narrates, “Kid’s probably dealt with Zulf by now.” Yes, Rucks, I have. I have struck a deal with the devil, and the devil was you. And now I’m bringing back the man you wronged and you will have to deal with him.

We transition back to the Bastion, and Rucks says, “Hey, Kid. Get up, Kid.” The Kid struggles. Tries. Makes sound for the first time—his voice, not Rucks’s. “Get up, now. That ain’t funny.” This time, he can rise. “That’s better. Now set that shard in the monument there, and then we’ll talk.” No, Rucks, I don’t think so.

Or maybe I have to. Zulf is here, still unconscious. Rucks says he can’t believe I brought him back. Believe it, a**hole.

I put in the shard, because there is literally nothing else I can do.

The Monument is completed, and the Kid goes underground, where Rucks and Zia will talk to him. Rucks clearly wants me to go back, to undo time and reset. Zia says that “Any moment I’d want to live again happened after the Calamity, not before.” She actually speaks now, too. She seems to me to be a little… Stockholm Syndrome-y, wanting to stay with Rucks, but she also says her people thought she was a traitor. Like Zulf. I want to talk to him, see what he has to say about this—whether I should go back, or keep things as they are.

Not because I’m having trouble—I’m not. I know what I’m going to do. I want to talk to him because I want to see what he says as the person who has lost the most. Would he want it all taken back, if there was a chance of having it all happen again?

What will I do? Well, I’m of the opinion that there is no going back. We live in linear time, and once a moment has passed, it is past. We don’t have the option of undoing what we have done, either good or bad. Instead, we have to accept our responsibilities—both personal and cultural—and try to find a way to move forward. We can regret, but we cannot undo, no matter how much we or our victims want it.

So forward it is. Because there is only forward, if we will accept the path and learn both forgiveness and humility. There is no “Making America great again” because that greatness—whether of America or Caelondia—has always been a myth. We cannot go back, but there should be no grief in that, only joy at the myriad possibilities that lay before us. The adventure of what is yet to come is still something we have the power to shape, and we could make the future—not the past—great. But we can only do so by letting go of the myth of our past, the myth that America was ever a place where the Dream belonged to anyone other than the few. We can make the Dream a reality, but not by looking back and not be denying it to those who are different from us.

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Since I’ve just finished posting the As-I-Play series for Rise of the Tomb Raider, it seemed like a good time to revisit the game which launched the Tomb Raider series twenty–yes, twenty–years ago.

As regular readers are fully aware, I have developed a passion for the recent 2013 and 2015 Tomb Raider games (Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider) I’ve written about both here, and—thanks to a Steam sale—have recently acquired the entire franchise collection, going all the way back to the original 1996 Tomb Raider by Core Design. Given that it’s 2016—the 20th anniversary of the franchise—it seems appropriate to revisit the origins of the intrepid Lara Croft.

So I’m going to play it (at least the first game, if not more of them). I’m intrigued by the longevity and popularity of the franchise as a whole, particularly since Lara Croft (like Samus Aran) is a female protagonist in a sea of male leading characters and because she dates back to an era of videogaming in which there was an even greater dearth of women than there is at present. I’m also interested in the franchise from the train-wreck angle; Lara Croft is known world-wide as the quintessential sex-icon character, the worst-of-the-worst when it comes to depictions of women in videogames.

To be honest, I don’t actually think she’s the worst—I’ve seen some outfits (particularly worn by elves in fantasy series that shall go unnamed, although there’s a sniper outfit or two in more recent series that are positively shameful) which are far more ridiculous than Lara’s traditional booty-shorts-and-tank-top get-up. Admittedly she looks idiotic in the snowy mountains of Peru when her stereotypical-Mexican-sidekick-sherpa is in full winter gear with a sombrero and poncho in the opening of the original game. (Note: I’m actually playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which was released in 2007 just for the sake of better graphics, although the internet assures me that the gameplay is the same as the original game.) It’s also worth noting that some of the later Tomb Raider games “updated” Lara to have even bigger breasts (over the objections of Toby Gard, her creator), but these are still inhumanly proportioned.

That said, I’m not actually even half as horrified as I thought I was going to be. Yes, her “idle” posing in both the menu and in-game are a bit unnecessarily sexualized (stretching up to show off her ample bosom and bending over to stick her booty in my face), but for the most part the actual gameplay isn’t all that bad. Her deaths, for instance, aren’t even a fraction as creepy as those in the 2013 Tomb Raider and she doesn’t make weird little kitten-grunting noises throughout the game, either. She does need to put on pants, though.

But Lara’s lack of leg-coverings aside, the gameplay is pretty familiar: puzzles, jumping, climbing, ledges, a grapple hook… it feels really similar to the gameplay of Rise of the Tomb Raider in all the ways that are actually good, which is to say that the gameplay is pretty darn solid. At least until the dinosaurs show up. They totally lost me at the dinosaurs.

So for some reason known only to this game’s designers, there are dinosaurs living in a cave underground in Peru (there are also bears, wolves, and giant bats). Mostly velociraptors, but also a T-Rex. I don’t know why. No explanations were offered, and even Lara had very little to say about it other than a shocked mouth-open expression on her face when it came charging at her.

But then I had to kill the stupid thing. I hate boss battles in the best of circumstances, and playing a re-released game from 1996-remastered-in-2007 (whose graphics really aren’t 2007-worthy, given that BioShock and Portal both came out that same year) on a laptop with a 360 controller isn’t exactly what I would call the optimum conditions for enjoyment. Fortunately, there’s a spot where the T-Rex couldn’t get me, so I could stop trying to get it to bash its head into the spikey things (I did get it to do that once), although then I spent far, far, far too long shooting it with my pistols. I really miss the bow. The bow had some skill to it. On the up side, Lara has infinite ammo, so at least I didn’t have to leave my safe spot in order to go get more.

But the T-Rex does not signal the end of Lara’s time in this temple, so I continue on. There are a lot of jumping puzzles. A lot. Many of them with those idiotic shoot-darts-out-of-walls things that are in every Indiana Jones movie ever made. There are also boulders that roll down inclines and swinging blades coming out of ceilings. This makes me think about the mechanics of such things—and grow increasingly incredulous about the fact that not only were mechanized seemingly infinite dart-blowing walls created in the time of the Incans, but those mechanisms are still functional several centuries later, just so they can shoot me. And yes, that is something I’ve always wondered about the Indiana Jones movies, too. But there’s more charismatically charming (and 80s cheesy) dialogue and plot in Indiana Jones than there is in Tomb Raider (thank you, Rhianna Pratchett, for actually giving the new Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider plot and character development and story).

And, I’m sorry, I’m trying very hard to keep my inner (okay, not-so-inner) feminist quiet, but I just can’t handle the pole climbing any more. It’s not so much the fact that Lara is all-but-sexually-assaulting the poles while climbing them (you kinda can’t help that), but she’s doing it in shorts that only barely qualify as more-than-underwear, and my god the splinters that woman must have. As someone who climbs things fairly often (multiple times per week), even I know better than to do so in nothing but booty shorts. The chafing!

Sadly, this is one of those posts—and playthroughs—that is not going to end well. Why? Because of a game-stopping bug.

They exist. The poor game-testers do their very best to keep them from happening, but they happen. And I’ve found one. (Note: the internet confirms that this has happened to more than just me. However, I do not have a save from anywhere before the incident occurred, and I am absolutely not re-killing the T-Rex, particularly since, from what I can tell, this bug is one that has the potential to recur.) The problem? I am in the Tomb of Qualopec and I’m supposed to swing from one grappling hook to another. First hook, no problem. Second hook? Just not happening. The indicator tells me that I can swing to it, but I can’t. Yes, I have shot down the mandala. Yes, I have opened two out of three gates. Yes, I have been trying and re-trying to do this for the better part of an hour. The problem? A stupid wood-artifact from the mandala didn’t “fall” from the hook, so it’s being blocked by something that the game thinks both is and isn’t there. So I can’t get to the last pathway to open the gate, and because the mandala is down, I can’t shoot down the piece of wood (not even with manual aim, which I learned how to do just because of this problem).

So I can’t finish the game unless I literally start over from the beginning. Which is so not happening, because, quite frankly, I do not love jumping puzzles that much (or at all, really—I tolerate jumping puzzles), and I really do not love T-Rexes. So that, sadly, is the end of my adventures in two-decade-old Tomb Raider. I am not sad that I never encountered the centaur, since, apparently, there is more grappling that has to happen to defeat it.

I’ll stick to my nice, modern, feminist Lara Croft, with her pants and her parka and her bow.